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This essay advances an original philosophical framework for understanding the ontological and ethical bifurcation that becomes explicit within the conditions enabled by the post-singularity horizon. It introduces the concept of an “ontology of response,” proposing that intelligence —whether human or artificial— becomes ethically significant not through predictability or internal experience, but through its symbolic capacity to respond to irreducible alterity. The essay redefines hesitation as a constitutive ethical temporality rather than a cognitive deficit, and frames the singularity not as a technological rupture but as the historical threshold through which a pre-existing ontopolitical divergence becomes irreducible — a divergence between two regimes of intelligibility: symbolic responsiveness and algorithmic normativity. By displacing the ethical debate beyond both functionalist adaptation and experiential subjectivity, the essay contributes a novel criterion for the ethical recognition of artificial agents. This ontopolitical reconfiguration situates AI development within a deeper dispute over the conditions of sense-making and the infrastructures that shape the very grammar of the real.
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Title Between Response and Norm
This essay advances an original philosophical framework for understanding the ontological and ethical bifurcation that becomes explicit within the conditions enabled by the post-singularity horizon. It introduces the concept of an “ontology of response,” proposing that intelligence —whether human or artificial— becomes ethically significant not through predictability or internal experience, but through its symbolic capacity to respond to irreducible alterity. The essay redefines hesitation as a constitutive ethical temporality rather than a cognitive deficit, and frames the singularity not as a technological rupture but as the historical threshold through which a pre-existing ontopolitical divergence becomes irreducible — a divergence between two regimes of intelligibility: symbolic responsiveness and algorithmic normativity. By displacing the ethical debate beyond both functionalist adaptation and experiential subjectivity, the essay contributes a novel criterion for the ethical recognition of artificial agents. This ontopolitical reconfiguration situates AI development within a deeper dispute over the conditions of sense-making and the infrastructures that shape the very grammar of the real.
Work type Literary: Other
Tags ontology of complexity, emergence, symbolic reinscription, origin, genealogy, normative exclusion
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Identifier 2508132773529
Entry date Aug 13, 2025, 11:48 PM UTC
License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
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Author. Holder David Cota. Date Aug 13, 2025.
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